Skip to main content

Figure it out yourself

In this blog, Guy Kawasaki writes about 10 (real world) things college students ought to learn. He has raised some very good points that are not taught in school but are extremely important at work.

In point #4 he says:

How to figure out anything on your own. Armed with Google, PDFs of manuals, and self-reliance, force yourself to learn how to figure out just about anything on your own. There are no office hours, no teaching assistants, and study groups in the real world. Actually, the real world is one long, often lonely independent study, so get with it. Here’s a question to test your research prowess. How do you update the calendar in a Motorola Q phone with appointments stored in Now-Up-To-Date? (I’ll send a copy of The Art of the Start to the first person with a good answer.)

This brings to mind ideas that I have been trying to talk about for a while: self learning, informal learning, and continuous learning. I would again like to take this opportunity to remind you of the importance of learning continuously. Sometimes there are things that have to be learned because the need just came up, but most often it helps to have a plan. In my next blog I will write about how to make such a plan... so stay tuned :-)



Notes: This text was originally posted on my earlier blog at http://www.adaptivelearningonline.net
Here are the comments from the original post


-----
COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Sachin More
URL:
DATE: 08/24/2006 07:30:53 AM
I would like to add one more line from the same blog...

The purpose of learning is "not to" prepare for working but to prepare for living(This is what I personally belive in). Working is a part of living, and it requires these kinds of skills no matter what career you pursue.

However, "there is much more to life than work".
Why do we forget this?



COMMENT:

AUTHOR: Tarun Chandel

URL: http://tarunchandel.blogspot.com

DATE: 10/19/2006 10:07:15 AM

I had a chance to meet Guy at IBM Software Universe in Mumbai recently. Guy is very cool person and loves to live life. He is fun to talk to. He is VC by profession and has missed chance to invest in companies like Google, Yahoo. He is a very experienced man and just 5 minutes of talk with him can leave you charged and inspired to follow your dreams.

Coming back to the current post I think life teaches us a lot of lessons and if we keep our eyes open and keep looking for information, there is more than enough information avilable around us. I think the most important ability to have in today's world is to have ability to learn, learnability. Learn new things, make sense of things changing around you, ask right questions and find answers to those questions based of facts.



COMMENT:

AUTHOR: Parag

DATE: 10/19/2006 12:28:22 PM

That's a good point Tarun... make sense of things around you and ask the right questions. The right questions will usually lead to the right answers.

The ability to find connections between seemingly unrelated areas is also very important. it helps in broadening a persons perspective and find ingenuine solutions to problems.

--
Parag

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My HSQLDB schema inspection story

This is a simple story of my need to inspect the schema of an HSQLDB database for a participar FOREIGN KEY, and the interesting things I had to do to actually inspect it. I am using an HSQLDB 1.8 database in one of my web applications. The application has been developed using the Play framework , which by default uses JPA and Hibernate . A few days back, I wanted to inspect the schema which Hibernate had created for one of my model objects. I started the HSQLDB database on my local machine, and then started the database manager with the following command java -cp ./hsqldb-1.8.0.7.jar org.hsqldb.util.DatabaseManagerSwing When I tried the view the schema of my table, it showed me the columns and column types on that table, but it did not show me columns were FOREIGN KEYs. Image 1: Table schema as shown by HSQLDB's database manager I decided to search on StackOverflow and find out how I could view the full schema of the table in question. I got a few hints, and they all pointed to ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Commenting your code

Comments are an integral part of any program, even though they do not contribute to the logic. Appropriate comments add to the maintainability of a software. I have heard developers complain about not remembering the logic of some code they wrote a few months back. Can you imagine how difficult it can be to understand programs written by others, when we sometimes find it hard to understand our own code. It is a nightmare to maintain programs that are not appropriately commented. Java classes should contain comments at various levels. There are two types of comments; implementation comments and documentation comments. Implementation comments usually explain design desicisions, or a particularly intricate peice of code. If you find the need to make a lot of implementation comments, then it may signal overly complex code. Documentation comments usually describe the API of a program, they are meant for developers who are going to use your classes. All classes, methods and variables ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Inheritance vs. composition depending on how much is same and how much differs

I am reading the excellent Django book right now. In the 4th chapter on Django templates , there is an example of includes and inheritance in Django templates. Without going into details about Django templates, the include is very similar to composition where we can include the text of another template for evaluation. Inheritance in Django templates works in a way similar to object inheritance. Django templates can specify certain blocks which can be redefined in subtemplates. The subtemplates use the rest of the parent template as is. Now we have all learned that inheritance is used when we have a is-a relationship between classes, and composition is used when we have a contains-a relationship. This is absolutely right, but while reading about Django templates, I just realized another pattern in these relationships. This is really simple and perhaps many of you may have already have had this insight... We use inheritance when we want to allow reuse of the bulk of one object in other ...
3 comments
Read more